Free website load time checker - Google Friendly

Matt Cutts, Google Software Engineer and well know Internet Marketers best friend, announced recently that Google is planning to include website load time as one of the ranking factors in the 2010 search algorithm.

Does your website load fast enough to bebefit by the new Google search algorithm? Find out with our free website load speed test. You can even compare your website load speeds with the load speed of your competitors.

Search Engine Optimization experts tell us that it is estimated that if a page fails to load within 6 to 8 seconds you will lose up to 30% of your visitors. So if you are a smart website owner and your website loads slower than your competitors perhaps you should re-work your design, site structure or even consider moving your website to a faster web server.


Website Load Speed Tool

Your domain(s): Enter each Domain name on a new line (Maximum 10) - (eg. webseo.com.au)
 
  
 

Is your website load time too slow?

Try these tips to improve your website speed:

  1. Remove anything and everything that you really don't need on your website
    Something I come across every day as a fulltime website designer are website owners that want everything that flashes, whistles and bangs added to their sites. In most cases I have to basically fight these people with an argument that "People are visiting your website to get information - just give them what they want !" Your visitors don't want to see a javascript clock flying across their screens or some huge GIF animation of a jumping Kangaroo.

    All this extra stuff uses extra bandwidth and extra bandwidth means slow loading web pages. Google hates slow loading web pages and they will penalise you with a page ranking on page 144.

  2. Avoid nested tables as much as you can
    70% of website designers and developers are still using "Tables" to structure their websites. Adding tables is still ok, but savy web designers are mastering CSS (custom style sheets) which gives them much more flexibility in holding their sites together. But if you are still going to use Tables, Don't place one or more Tables inside another table. By placing a Table within another Table is called Nesting and modern Browsers need much more time to parse them, which in turn makes the webpage load much slower. And remember Google hates slow loading web pages!

  3. Use CSS styles where possible
    By using a linked Cascading Style Sheet (styles.css), which is basically a set of display instructions sent to your Browser your html source code will be lighter and therefore load your website faster.

    For example, you could replace this code:
    <div align="right"><font face="Arial, Verdana, Sans Serif" color="#000000" size="4"><b>Your Content Here</b></font></div> with something like this: <div class="style1">Your Content Here</div>

    With the class style1 being sent via your styles.css file. See the difference ? The second example is much smaller and will load quicker and there are many great internet sites where you can learn some CSS basics.

  4. Fast Loading Website Images - Optimizing your images
    Images rich websites take forever to load and each image if not optimized properly can take up to 60 seconds to load. Reduce the amount of images as much as you can by removing all non essential images and graphics. If you have large GIF animations, replace them with smaller static images.

    When placing images within your website, always define the width and height of an image by setting the image tag attributes. By adding the dimensions this way, the browser will know how the images will look and will load the rest of the page, the browser won't need to guess. Otherwise, it loads the image first and then the rest of the page.

    If you want to add larger images, consider using smaller clickable thumbnails which when clicked will load the larger image.

    Image Optimization Tools: GIFCruncher for GIFs and JPEG Wizard for JPEGs.

    JPEGS are only good for fine images like photos, for all other web graphics GIF is usually a better choice.

  5. Clean up your HTML source code
    Many WYSIWYG HTML editors leave a lot of unnecessary html code like these empty tags like <font> </font> and comments in your source code. remove them with a simple text editor for a faster website loading.